Another side of Bob Dylan: Singer’s impressionistic paintings prove his creative genius

Another side of Bob Dylan: Singer’s impressionistic paintings prove his creative genius

MOST PEOPLE can list a few figures in the art world that seem to them important. Pablo Picasso, perhaps. Vincent Van Gogh, John Constable, Claude Monet, Bob Dylan. Excuse me? Well, yes, really. Bob Dylan.

The paintings transform the mundane into the iconic, as proper folk songs do

Probably it is best left to history to decide who is and isn't a great painter, because that's the kind of thing history is good at. But Bob declared in 1971 that everything was going to be different when he painted his masterpiece, and these days with 1,000 or so more songs and a Nobel prize under his belt he's making good on that promise.

The Beaten Path is an exhibition in London's Halcyon Gallery and is accompanied by a book of the same name. It's the result of the gallery asking Dylan to explore the theme of American landscape. The resulting 300 or so works add up to the ultimate US road trip in watercolour, oil and acrylic. You look at them and because he is who he is, you get continual echoes of songs, his own and other people's.

Personally I first saw scenes like these with my eyes closed listening to North Country Blues longer ago than I care to specify.

PH

Endless Highway is just one of Dylan’s works that take us on a mesmerising trip across America

Come gather 'round friends and I'll tell you a tale Of when the red iron pits ran a-plenty But the cardboard filled windows and old men on the benches Tell you now that the whole town is empty.

Then again, only slightly more recently, in Tangled Up In Blue: We drove that car as far as we could Abandoned it out West Split up on a dark sad night Both agreeing it was best.

Dylan himself suggests that if there was to be a soundtrack to the whole thing he might suggest Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charlie Parker, which under the circumstances is kind of modest. In his own words he tried to "depersonalise the works, strip them of illusion". The treatment can indeed be detached and stark yet at the same time is loaded with emphatic line and colour.

PH

The singer-songwriter’s impressionistic paintings prove he is a genius whatever he turns his hand to

It's the landscape of John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie but really it isn't a landscape at all. Dylan's work has always dissected relationships and character. Here, human structures imposed on uncompromising terrain reflect Americans' ambiguous romance with the country out of which they scoured their life and their culture.

Where there are people, they exist to define and be defined by the wider scene. There is a unifying style and perspective to the works and you're sometimes reminded of Dylan's singular ability to make the flaws in what he does just add to the perfection.

So are we supposed to revisit our idea of Bob Dylan and accept that his genius extends beyond poetry and songs? The art world seems ready to accept him.

He has been compared to Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse and David Hockney. When he paints figures you might also think Gauguin.

After his first exhibition, in an obscure gallery in Germany, critic Burkhard Muller said: "The pictures that are on show would also be worth viewing even if Bob Dylan had never sung a note or written a line of poetry."

The experts therefore give us permission to like what we see, which is very nice of them. Yet Dylan is no dilettante. He learned his trade and paid a lot of dues getting through. He took his first painting lessons in 1966 when slowed up somewhat following a bad accident on his 500cc Triumph.

He talks about his technique and reveals the struggle of getting what he wanted. He sometimes used an old-fashioned camera obscura because that was what Caravaggio and Vermeer employed when the "hand couldn't do what the eye was perceiving".

Bob Dylan went electric, 1965

Sat, July 25, 2015

On this day the 25 July 1965, Bob Dylan infamously went electric with "The Band" for the first time performing at the Newport Folk Festival, Rhode Island.

You use a dark chamber with a hole so the image projects (blurred and upside down) on the wall. Or he used a Nikon D3300 DSLR as a sketch-pad. A straight edge, a compass and a T-square helped "create a two-dimensional image using a mathematical system". Don't be put off: the works owe more to Van Gogh than Pythagoras.

As for theme and meaning, arguably what you take away from the art ties in with whatever you take away from the songs. That incisive, visceral realism. I looked the first time and was intrigued, the second time, I was convinced. Mind you, I'm incurably drawn to Dylan's perception of the world and my other favourite artist was also a poet. His name was William Blake and though I think Bob has him beat on draughtsmanship they are well matched in drive and spirit.

Dylan or no Dylan, anyone ever attracted by the idea of driving from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a long, flat car, preferably with some kind of fins on the rear wings, will find much to love in these images.